Omega Days (Volume 1) - By John L. Campbell Page 0,60

the sidewalk.

He never saw it coming.

San Jose

The refugee center lasted five days before it was overrun. The dead massed against the hastily erected chain link fences and finally pushed them over, pouring in among the Red Cross tents. More than four thousand refugees were slaughtered inside of thirty minutes, including the soldiers sent to protect them. Pilots were pulled screaming from helicopter cockpits before they could lift off, and the aircraft sat empty on their pads, rotors turning until they ran out of fuel.

Malibu

Claire Mercer was twenty-two, Hollywood beautiful (tucks, Botox and implants which had healed nicely) and on her way to becoming a star. Midnight Beauty was red hot; gorgeous, pampered, twenty-somethings filled with angst falling in and out of love and danger with equally hip vampires. After coming in midway through the season and getting smash reviews, she had been signed as a regular for next year, and handed a fat contract. Those first paychecks had made for a nice down payment on the beach house.

Her agent was already talking movie deals, maybe a perfume line.

The flu (the real flu, not that other crazy shit that was going around) had kept her in bed and out of touch with the world for days. She had turned off the cell, disconnected the house phone, and spent her time on the bowl, puking into the tub beside her or curled up and shivering under the blankets. She felt like dying, and didn’t want to talk to anyone. Out-of-touch was what she got, and she missed some important news.

Now she stood in her living room, an impressive view of the beach and the Pacific beyond rows of tall windows, wearing vomited stained pink pajamas and holding a butcher knife. The dead were smashing their way through all that glass, moaning and tumbling into the house. Claire stood and screamed.

Her agent would have been proud. It was a horror star’s scream.

Palm Springs

Gloria tried to steer and fight off her husband at the same time, stomping the brakes and cranking the wheel hard to the left, into their driveway. Gravity threw him and his snapping teeth away from her (and threw her snarling teenage son across the back seat) long enough for her to crash the Volvo into the side of the house.

The airbags deployed, saving her from a spinal injury, and pinning her undead husband against his seat.

Gloria fumbled for the handle and fell out onto the driveway, her nose broken and bleeding from the airbag, and ran for the house, sobbing. Her husband and son managed to get out too, and lurched after her, but she made it inside and slammed the front door, locking it. They pounded the wood, flinging their bodies against it, as Gloria backed into her front room, hands over her mouth and shaking her head.

All they had wanted to do was stock up on groceries and bottled water, but the supermarket parking lot was like an asylum, people wrestling carts away from each other, pushing and hitting. It was like hell’s version of Black Friday. Then those two things tried to crawl through the open side windows and tore into her boys. Gloria got them out of there in the Volvo, but they died on the way home. For a while.

Father and son groaned and hammered at the door, and Gloria sat down to cry.

An hour later a pair of rifle shots rang out from the street, and the pounding stopped. A bullhorn voice echoed through the neighborhood. “This is the United States Marines. All civilians are being evacuated to Twenty-Nine Palms. Come to the sound of my voice, and wave something white over your head. Any persons not waving white will be shot. This will be the only evacuation of this neighborhood.”

Gloria heard a line of trucks rumbling past, but made no move to go outside. When they were gone, she got out her photo albums and spent an hour looking through them, crying softly. Then she drew a warm bath and placed a razor blade on the marble edge before getting undressed.

Madera

Their skin was brown to begin with, but years of working in the sun, moving between orchards and farms and being outside in all sorts of weather had turned it to creased leather. They were people with little interest in their political status, other than avoiding deportation, which was no longer a concern. For them there had been only work and family.

There were seven families, over fifty people, and they kept to the